The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) is market leader in the energy utility sector in Ireland. The ESB was founded in 1927 and is 95% owned by the Irish Government, the remaining shares are owned by ESB employees. The ESB is a vertically integrated utility and it includes a number of divisions, which operate independently in the Irish electricity market. These include ESB Power generation, ESB Customer Supply and ESB Networks.

In February 2005 a new bill came into being which decreed that all electricity consumers in Ireland should be free to choose their own electricity supplier. ESB were aware that these changes in the market would result in an immediate increase in the number of calls to their customer contact centres for a number of reasons including changes to customer account numbers and meter readings.

To prepare for this the ESB decided it needed to improve the performance of all its customer contact centres, by decreasing the call waiting times for customers. ESB wanted to do this without increasing cost. So they went to tender to find a solution that could do just this.

The ESB decided Fujitsu's Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) solution from InterVoice™ would be implemented at its Cork and Dublin Customer Contact Centres and would improve customer service and reduce waiting times without any extra resourcing requirements.